Using IXL to Drive Student Achievement

I  attended a webinar this morning given by Bobbi Bear of IXL.  After spending an hour with Bobbi, I felt inspired to share some of my biggest take-aways with those of you who are currently using this tool:

• Analytics is a new IXL feature.  It has several tabs that encourage the teacher to drive the instruction. The Skills tab allows you to see at a glance what question level your students are working on and what their current SmartScore is.  The Real Time Center tab makes it easy for the teacher to monitor on one screen what skills, questions, and time-on-task behaviors students are exhibiting.  The Trouble Spots and Question Log tabs give valuable insight about where students are struggling.  

• Instructors can now use a highlighting tool to visually mark a skill they want students to practice.

• SmartScore is just a measure of progress and should not be used in the grade book.

• Grade levels can be turned off to provide differentiated instruction.

• Audio can be turned on in the teacher settings for students in second grade and above. Pre-k through first grades have audio by default.

AND MY FAVORITE TAKEAWAY...

• The new Social Studies and Science component of IXL features comprehension tasks perfect for the ELA classroom (i.e. inferencing, drawing conclusions)

How do you use IXL in your classroom?  What features are especially helpful to you?  Please share in the comments section below.

Integrating Technology and Study Skills

image via Pixabay

In her recent blog post, Christina Karmecy, our elementary guidance counselor writes about Sean Covey's habit of synergy and the importance of staff collaboration in the school environment.  See Christina's post here.  Christina and I recently worked together to teach study skills to some of our upper elementary students.  This was a great opportunity for me.  Christina is extremely organized and has some inspiring, well-researched ideas.

Christina prepared a lesson to allow students to analyze the learning style or styles that would complement them personally.  Together with the students, we discussed each of these styles and some important study tips that would work for each one.  Throughout this discussion, I was able to suggest some technology tools that could be integrated for each style.  Here were a few of my suggestions:

Visual Learners-these learners learn best by seeing:

• Use applications such as Notability or Skitch to highlight or annotate your notes and photos.
• Create your own flashcards using Quizlet.
• Flowcharts or diagrams can be created using Google Drawings, Lucidchart and Popplet. 
• Pic Collage is a great tool to build visual timelines.  There are many great web applications as well.  
• Loupe Collage or the Word Clouds app will allow learners to turn words into a picture.  Matt Bergman of the Learn, Lead, Grow blog shares some inspiration here.

Auditory Learners-learn best by hearing:

• Use the voice to text feature available in many ios apps and now available in Google Docs as well.  Dragon Dictation is another useful tool for this.
• QuickVoice Recorder is a great tool for recording your reading or thoughts.
• Sweet Midi Player will allow the learner to put notes to music.  Here are some ideas for incorporating the Garage Band tool.

Kinesthetic Learners-learn best by moving and doing:

• Use Quizlet to build your own flashcards
• Many technology tools encourage creation.  Create your own study guide or tutorials using Educreations, Pic Collage, Popplet, Book Creator, Explain Everything or iMovie.
• Applications such as Fluidity, Kids Doodle, Writing Wizard, Doodle Buddy and  My Blackboard give learners various tactile experiences.
• Use built in smartphone timers to build in study breaks.

Our students use and learn via technology everyday. We need to meet them where they live.  Let's encourage them to try some of these technology integrated tips to study our classroom content. If you have additional suggestions, please add them using the comments section below so that we might all benefit. Please contact me if I can help you implement a tool or strategy.  Thank you for reading!

Why You Need Padlet

In our digital classrooms, we need easy ways to collect digital assignments that may include links, images, video files and text. We also need simple ways for our students to collaborate, connect, discuss and share their work.

I have talked about the Padlet application before, but I was having a conversation with one of my fellow teachers this morning , and realized that I needed to highlight this tool again because not only is it EASY to use but it is also RELEVANT to almost any curriculum area or assignment.

Padlet is simply an online bulletin board.  Some reasons why it is so valuable:

• students DO NOT need an account
• it is FREE
• material can be added and edited using computers, tablets or phones
• text, video, links, documents, comments can ALL be added
• the Padlet wall will grow based on need
• Padlets can be embedded in other places (websites, fusion pages, blogs)
• Padlets can be arranged free-form, stream or grid based on project

Some useful ways to use a Padlet Wall:

• to collect and showcase student work all in one place great way to share projects completed with varied tools
• student book reviews
• class notes powerful way to have students collaborate and share notes
• brainstorming sessions
• exit tickets
• back channel for video discussions
• digital portfolio
• sentence starter activities
• collaborative group work
• question/answer activities
• collecting assignment resources all in one place
• posting flipped classroom content for students

Here are a few examples in practice:

Eighth grade s. studies timeline project:

Created with Padlet

A Math Polygon Activity:

Created with Padlet

Word of the Day Activity:

Created with Padlet

Foreign Language Practice:

Created with Padlet

If you might be interested in learning more about Padlet at an upcoming inservice, please indicate in the comments section below.  Please also feel free to share some thoughts about how you would like to integrate this tool into your classroom.  Thanks for reading!

Screencasting

Screencasting and screencasting tools have become very popular with teachers recently due to a rise in flipped classrooms and blended learning scenarios.  Although teacher-created screencasts have tremendous value, a student-created screencast is personally my favorite way to utilize this tool. Students can create screencasts to demonstrate their learning.  They  demonstrate their understanding of a topic by combining annotations, images and voice comments. Here are some screencast projects created by our fifth graders to demonstrate their understanding of cause and effect.  Thank you Mrs. Adametz for sharing!





 Some classroom assignments where you might find screencasting useful:

• science lab results

• report on research

• solve and explain math problems
• compare and contrast 
• oral descriptions
• how-to tutorials
• oral reading
• story retells

These screencast projects were made using the free version of Educreations.  What tools do you use to screencast?  Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

An Interview- Paul Elliott

I had the great honor of being able to interview teacher, Paul Elliott this morning.  Paul is the Gifted/Enrichment teacher in our elementary building at South Side Area School District.  Paul graciously agreed to talk with me about how he utilizes a wiki in his classroom.  Paul is quite knowledgeable about how wikis can and should work, but doesn't lose sight of the fact that a wiki is simply a tool and it's use should be balanced with other appropriate tools- both digital and analog. Our recorded conversation is linked below.  Please note that the conclusion of our conversation is not included because my recording device ran out of space, however, the recorded exchange is full of best practices and some excellent thoughts for using this tool in your own classroom.  I am also including links for Paul's wiki page and for pages of some of his students so that you might check these out yourself.  Thank you Paul for sharing!  I enjoyed our conversation and learned a great deal as well.



http://explore.sswiki.com/

http://joslyt.sswiki.com/

http://adapav.sswiki.com/

Please add to the conversation by sharing your experiences with wikis for teaching and learning in the comments below.

Two Time-Saving Tools For Your Classroom

This week, Beth Skibinski, one of our first grade teachers asked me to check out an app called Tiny Scanner.  I instantly fell in love with this app!  This is an easy to use scanner for your smartphone. Of course, a scanner for your phone is an awesome idea for so many non-school reasons, but as a classroom tool it can potentially eliminate your need to visit the copy room.  What teacher can't appreciate that?  With this app, you can scan non-digital content wherever you are and share it with your students digitally.  Don't redo all of those old pre-digital units that you spent so much time to build!  If you are using Google Classroom, as our district does, just attach your scanned pdf to your assignment.  Your students can access the document, open and complete it using an annotation tool such as Notability.  After previewing the lite version of this tool, I almost immediately upgraded to the pro version so that I would have more sharing options (Google Drive, Dropbox etc.). Thank you Beth for sharing.

Tiny Scanner Pro

Kristen Woodling, one of our Special Ed. teachers, shared another easy-to-use tech integration idea.  She and her team are using the Chirp app to help students who have difficulty transferring information from the board.  During morning routine, students are asked to edit a sentence from the board.  One student takes a photo of the sentence on his or her iPad, then "chirps" it to all of the other students in the class.  Learners then have the sentence on their own device, right in front of them to reference.  Thank you Kristen for a simple and thoughtful solution to a long-time classroom challenge.

Chirp app for iPhone

If you use a smartphone scanner  that you like, please share it with us in the comments below.  I would also love to hear about additional pdf annotation tools that our students with laptops can take advantage of.  Thanks for reading!  Thanks for sharing! 

Making The Most Of IXL

A good majority of our staff is now using the IXL tool for math and language arts support and practice.  This will be the first in a series of posts to show you how to make the most of this tool.

Some Valuable Reasons To Use IXL?

• Common Core aligned practice and review
• allows for vertical alignment between grade levels
• easy to use reports that track student progress
• efficient tool for collecting SLO data

Having your class use IXL is a great first step, but the real power of the tool is in the data that it provides for the teacher.  IXL generates various, easy-to-read reports and graphs that support and inform your teaching. You can find detailed directions on the IXL site here.  However, I have tried to streamline this process even further for those of you just getting started with pulling reports.    

3 Easy Clicks To Access A Report:

• After logging into your teacher account,  click on Reports.

• Find the Performance tab along left side of screen, click on it.

• Tap on Recent Skills.

• You are now able to both view and print reports of all of the recent skills that your students have practiced.

**As an additional tool, to help you organize,  IXL provides these handy printable grade progress charts.

I hope these tips will help you get started.  If you would like to see a specific area of IXL covered in an upcoming post, please leave your idea in the comments section below.

Provide Audio Options for Students to "Show What They Know"

Headphone & Laptop #3 by Jeshu John via DesignersPics.com

In the article The Smart Way to Use IPads in the Classroom (Lisa Guernsey, 2013)  Sam Ross, a second grade teacher talks about the power of adding audio components to our students' assignments and projects. "Children are being able to show what's in their minds by adding oral explanation".  "That's off-the-charts amazing."  He explains that this is particularly effective for students who may not like to speak up in class.

Our third grade classrooms are using Voice Record Pro to practice their reading fluency.  They record themselves reading an assigned passage,  Then they share these recordings with their teacher via Google Drive.  Click here for a student instruction page to use with your class.

Some of our middle school students have created a Voki to share what they learned about their personality types.  See an example project here.

Here are a few additional tools to add audio and voice to your projects and activities:

Educreations
Vocaroo
Book Creator
Notability
VoiceThread
Audioboom


Do you use audio tools in your class creations and projects?  Please share some of your ideas, resources or thoughts in the comments below.

Coordinate Geometry With Some Hi-Tech Tools

 Mrs. O'Connors' math classes have been working on coordinate geometry for the past two weeks.  As a culminating project in this unit, Mrs. O'Connor challenged her fifth grade students to create a plot map of some prominent landmarks in their hometown. This was an interdisciplinary project that included critical reading strategies, accurate writing and grammar skills in addition to complex problem solving.  Over the course of the week, the students used Notability and Google Classroom to complete and turn in these projects on their iPads.   Here are a few example projects shared below:

How Do Your Students Use Word Clouds?

The fifth graders in our building along with their teachers, Mrs. Adametz and Mrs. Veze, created some pretty impressive word clouds this week.  They built these clouds based on the inner character traits that they observe in one other.  Not only was this an introductory lesson on character traits, but it was also an engaging back-to-school community building activity. The students used the web tool Taxedo to create their clouds but there are many word cloud creation tools available for teachers and students besides this particular one.

  

If you want to try a similar project on the iPad, Word Clouds by abcya is a free and easy to use tool.  When combined with PicCollage, any number of photo options are available.  Below is a character traits word cloud example using those two applications.

Word Clouds can be used in so many different ways.  Try them for:

• synonyms
• antonyms
• main idea
• activate prior knowledge
• exit ticket
• adjectives

How do you use word clouds in your classroom?  Please share in the comments below.

What is RSS feed and why do I need it?

Educators today have access to a vast amount of amazing content that supports both teaching and learning.  The Internet is overflowing with blogs and websites that contain rich resources, engaging activities, lesson plans and expert advice.  The problem has become-- How do we find this great content and how do we keep up-to-date without becoming completely overwhelmed?

Enter the RSS feed.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.   Most websites have RSS feeds. You can use a free RSS reader to subscribe to your favorite websites and blogs.  When you subscribe, the RSS reader will alert you every time a website is updated with new content.  It is kind of like a subscription to a magazine.  RSS readers can be installed on all of your devices.

My favorite RSS reader is Feedly, but there are many free options out there.  Feedly works with my google account log in.  I did not have to create a new account.  Feedly was recommended to me by one of our administrators, Andrea Welch.  I used to spend a great deal of time visiting individual bookmarked websites and then having to return to them to check for updated content.  Now Feedly updates my reader with freshly published content as it is posted.  I use Feedly to check in with my favorite websites whenever I have a few free minutes (lunch break, sitting in a waiting room, reading before bed, etc.)

To give Feedly a try, start by copying the URL above from this blog and plugging it into the search bar in Feedly.  This allows you to subscribe to my blog.  Click on my blog and add it to your reader.  Next, copy and paste several more URLs from your favorite websites into the Feedly search bar.  You will now receive timely updates on the content that matters most to you.  Please share a comment below if you have a favorite RSS reader or a favorite website that might benefit another reader.

Looking for one place to connect with ALL of your parents and students this year?

Bloomz is a new parent/teacher communication tool that works across ALL platforms and devices.  If you are familiar with Remind (formerly Remind101), it is similar but with some additional and unique features.  I first learned about this tool from Angela Watson at The Cornerstone.  She saw it in action at the ISTE conference in June of this year.  She has analyzed and shared some of the best features of this tool in this informative article.  I love that you can schedule your parent/teacher conferences on it!  I have not yet personally tried this out, but plan to give it a go with our upcoming Girls on the Run program this fall.  Please comment below if you have experience with or additional information about this application that you can share.

Back to School

A brand new school year is under way.  In my role as building technology coach, it is my goal to assist teachers and classrooms in utilizing and integrating the many great technology tools that we have available to us in our classrooms today.  I have created this blog for the purpose of sharing useful tips, tools and ideas as well as to highlight the commendable work of our district teachers and students.

My role as technology coach was new last year and my first task was to introduce some foundational tools that could be used in a 1:1 iPad environment.  These tools were chosen because they could be used across various grade levels and content areas.  The focus of these tools was on content creation rather that content consumption.

To warm us up this school year, I have found some top notch ways that other educators are using some of these same or similar tools...

Anyone interested in having their learners use interactive notebooks in class this year will definitely want to see this blog post from Book Creator where Brittany Banister and Tiffany Copple from 2 Techie Teachers have detailed how they used the Book Creator app to digitalize the traditional interactive notebook.

Meghan Zigmond from Zig Zagging through Education and Technology  has an inspiring blog post about teaching informational text features to her elementary students with the Explain Everything app.  Although our district uses the Educreations app for screencasting, this idea could easily be adapted to use with just about any screencasting tool.  See Meghan's post here.

                                       

Do you play scoot with your students to review or practice skills?   Erin Flanagan from Erin*tegration has developed lots of ways to play this classic game on an iPad.  Read her post here to learn more.  Erin sells many of her products on her Teachers Pay Teachers Store.